Glossary

Capacity is the ability to make one's own decisions.

Marked motor abnormalities, generally limited to those occurring as part of a non-organic psychotic disorder. This term includes:

• catatonic excitement (apparently purposeless agitation not influenced by external stimuli),
• stupor (decreased reactivity and fewer spontaneous movements, often with apparent unawareness of the surroundings),
• negativism (apparent motiveless resistance to instructions or attempts to be moved),
• posturing (the person's assuming and maintaining an inappropriate or bizarre stance),
• rigidity (the person's maintaining a stance or posture against all efforts to be moved), and
• waxy flexibility, or cerea flexibilitas (the person's limbs can be put into positions that are maintained).

The person's actual age.

Talking at length around a point before getting to it; characterised by over-inclusion of detail. The speaker does not lose the point, and clauses remain logically connected, but to the listener it seems that the end will never be reached. Characterised by an over-inclusion of detail. Documented in thought form and flow section of MSE.

The speaker does not lose the point, as is characteristic of loosening of associations, and clauses remain logically connected, but to the listener it seems that the end will never be reached. Compare with tangentiality.

Statements are connected by sound not by meaning. A type of thinking in which the sound of a word, rather than its meaning, gives the direction to subsequent associations.

Punning and rhyming may substitute for logic, and language may become increasingly a senseless compulsion to associate and decreasingly a vehicle for communication. Documented in thought form and flow section of MSE.

The ability to know and think, and occurs through the use of intellect, logic, reasoning, memory and all of the higher cortical functions.

The process of systematically gathering test scores and related data in order to make judgements about an individual's ability to perform various mental activities involved in the processing, acquisition, retention, conceptualization, and organisation of sensory, perceptual, verbal, spatial, and psychomotor information.

Pathological need to act on an impulse that, if resisted, produces anxiety; repetitive behaviour that a person feels compelled to undertake. Usually in response to an obsession. The individual is aware that the action is unreasonable.

It can include behaviour such as hand washing or mental acts such as praying or repeating words silently that aim to prevent or reduce distress or prevent some dreaded event or situation. The person feels driven to perform such actions in response to an obsession or according to rules that must be applied rigidly, even though the behaviors are recognised to be excessive or unreasonable.

The act or process of concentrating, especially the fixing of close, undivided attention.

The person remains literal and emphasises a concrete situation although not the same situation as is referred to in the proverb.